Sarah Long Bridge safe for opening, Maine DOT says

Wednesday

PORTSMOUTH — Nearly seven full months after the new $163 million Sarah Mildred Long Bridge was originally scheduled to open to traffic, the opening is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

The opening will follow a morning media tour of the span and control tower, Maine Department of Transportation press secretary Ted Talbot said. An official opening ceremony will be held later in the spring, he said.

MDOT officials delayed the expected opening date multiple times since September. The new bridge will again connect Portsmouth to Kittery, Maine, via the Route 1 Bypass over the Piscataqua River. The original bridge opened in 1940 and was taken out of service permanently in August 2016.

Officials are assuring the new bridge is safe, though concerns have been raised by the public since the MDOT announced in February that the new bridge’s center span was experiencing a “wavy rope” condition after the bridge was commissioned. MDOT project manager Jeff Folsom has previously stated the condition will likely expedite the need to replace wire cables that lift the center span, potentially within a few years, much earlier than the expected 25-year life span. He said MDOT has ordered a full set of extra cables at a cost of roughly $250,000, plus the cost of labor, to have ready when a replacement is required.

Folsom said when the time comes to replace the cables, it could be done with the bridge’s lift in the traffic position but it would limit navigation on the river for roughly two weeks to replace each side.

Despite MDOT assurances that the wavy ropes do not affect the bridge’s safety, area residents have expressed safety concerns on social media and through letters written to Seacoast Media Group. In response on Wednesday, Talbot said MDOT, “would never open, or allow to remain open, a bridge we considered unsafe,” adding safety is the first priority of the Maine and New Hampshire departments of transportation.

“We are proud of the hard work of everyone involved and very much look forward to opening the Sarah Mildred Long Bridge on Friday to serve the surrounding communities for generations to come," he said.

On Wednesday, Talbot declined to answer how the cables became wavy and did not comment further on if the ropes arrived on the construction site in that condition.

In late February, Seacoast Media Group filed a Freedom of Access Act request to MDOT to discover more about the causes of the bridge's extended delay. Some of the documents dating back to last summer indicate there were significant disagreements between MDOT and contractor Cianbro Corporation over items like extra work required to complete components on the bridge. Cianbro contended in July 2017 that MDOT failed to deliver a complete design on time and estimated the bridge would not be completed until April 5, 2018. MDOT has claimed that was a rejected construction schedule despite April 5 closely aligning with Friday's opening.

On March 2, Michael Hawkins, principal of the cables’ manufacturer, Hardesty and Hanover, wrote to MDOT’s chief engineer Joyce Taylor and certified the safety of the bridge following the discovery of the wavy ropes.

"The wavy rope sections wind on the drums at the end of span travel (span fully up or down) so skipping to the adjacent open groove does not adversely affect ropes already on the drum or continued operation of the span,” Hawkins wrote. “The operation speed of the drum is very slow. These factors, along with field observations, contribute to our conclusion that this condition would not adversely affect safe span operation.”

Hawkins also stated he believed “contractor installation operations” were at least a partial cause of the wavy rope condition but also stated a “major factor” was the size of the drums’ grooves the rope passes through.

“In review of the tensioning and start-up procedures, we realized that contractor installation operations subjected the ropes in these positions to high loads," Hawkins wrote. "These procedures stressed the ropes at these locations much high that normal operation will in the future. Even though the drum groove fabrication size is the major factor driving the wavy rope condition, it is possible that normal loadings may slow or stop growth and/or initiation of the wavy rope condition.”

Cianbro CEO Andi Vigue in a Feb. 27 letter to Taylor blamed the bridge's delayed opening on MDOT's failure to deliver a complete design for the bridge, which he claimed at the time still had not happened.

“While reasonable changes are to be expected in the construction process, the amount of change in this project is extraordinary – and is continuing even today,” Vigue wrote. “The impacts to the project that were caused by the incomplete design and the extra work required to accommodate these changes, were exacerbated by Maine DOT management, who was ill-equipped and unprepared for the deluge of issues that were forthcoming.”

Talbot declined to answer if the fabricated size of the drum groove was considered a design deficiency that resulted in the type of extra construction Vigue refers to in his Feb. 27 letter.

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